Recently, flexible circuit board technology has found applications in ribbon cables. The flexible circuit board based ribbon cable products that are commonly available in the market are often of a circuit board structure comprising a single-sided board, a double-sided board, or a multi-layer board, depending on the number of transmission lines required.
In certain currently prevailing consumer electronic devices, such as notebook computers, liquid crystal displays, digital cameras, mobile phones, and touch panels, and a number of other consumer electronic products, a cover or a display screen is often coupled to a device body of the electronic device with a hinge structure. To transmit electrical signals from the body of the electronic device to the cover or the display screen, a commonly adopted solution is connecting therebetween a transmission line that is constituted by for example a miniaturized ribbon cable or a bundled cluster of tiny wire harness. In such fields of application, the present applicant previously proposed a flexible circuit board based ribbon cable that is composed of a cluster section and a bundled flexible circuit based ribbon cable having a foldable structure, wherein the cluster section is composed of a cluster of multiple transmission lines or cables/wires that are formed by slitting the flexible substrate in a direction along which the substrate is extended.
For the flexible circuit board based ribbon cable that has a bundled structure and/or a cluster section, the cable needs to be handled in a subsequent process by setting a bundling structure around the cluster section or a selected portion of the cluster section to form the bundled structure. During the course of bundling the cluster section, conventionally, manual operation and intervention is required.